Seven Quick Takes: It's All About the Snow

1) Pictures, don't you think?

Father Rooster's "Priust," half-buried.
("My dad is a priest, so he drives a Priust!")

Drifting around our front door

Same view, with the front sidewalk shoveled

Lake Michigan shoreline, 2 days before the blizzard

2)  I ventured out on Thursday to find most roads passable, but with huge drifts on either side in places.  It felt like driving through a canyon!  At the worst spots, it was down to only one lane plowed--a little hairy to navigate with oncoming traffic.

3)  Still, as high as the drifts are in places, I'm not that impressed.  When I was a kid in Ohio, in January of 1978, the Great Blizzard nearly buried our one-story house.  I remember looking out the windows--to the north and to the south--and seeing nothing but snow.

4)  I also remember a snowmobile arriving at our house to pick up my mother, an emergency room nurse, to take her to work!  She got in a little trailer behind, and then we watched as they zoomed off toward town, level with the tree branches in our front yard.

5)  It was days before our country road was dug out, and when they came, they came in a Caterpillar.  They pushed the snow up on the sides of the road in piles that were 14 feet high!  My brothers and I made slides down all sides of those piles.  Some twisted and turned, some were straight shots, some were steep, some more gradual; we gave them all descriptive names, like "The Twister."  Then we started tunneling and building snow caves. It was the most fun a kid could ever have in the snow!

6)  And it lasted for weeks.  On March 21, the first day of spring, we took a picture of us kids with a snowdrift that was still there from the January blizzard.  And it was about that long before we could use our regular gravel L-shaped driveway.  Whoever plowed it out--I think this was before Dad got a snowplow attachment for his yard tractor--just took the shortest distance straight across our front yard and out to the road.  Didn't hurt our yard at all; the snow was packed down firm.

7)  My younger kids are working on tunnels and snow caves too.  Bantam15 has earned a small fortune this winter in snow removal--and that's just for our driveway!  Blondechick is getting great driving experience this winter--a little hair-raising for Mom and Dad.  All grist for the memory mill....

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